The Illusion of Victory (8 page)

Forster dashed off to notify reporters. They raced to their telephones. A young naval officer ran out on the sidewalk in front of the White House. Looking like someone fighting off a swarm of insects, he waved his arms to send a semaphore message to an officer in the State, War and Navy Building. Within minutes, wireless operators were flashing the news to navy ships and shore stations around the world. It was 1:18 P.M. on April 6, 1917—which happened to be Good Friday. The United States of America was at war with Germany.
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Almost a century after that dramatic week in April 1917, can we make sense out of its tangle of pro-and antiwar passion, the rhetoric of violated rights and democratic visions, the opposing denunciations of the war’s chief antagonists, Germany and Great Britain? The conduct of other wars and the research of numerous historians have shed some light, particularly on the reason why so many Americans—a majority, if the votes of Congress accurately reflected national sentiment (a still debated question)—favored Great Britain, and its allies, France and Russia.
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To understand the aggressive, often angry pro-war sentiment of the apparent American majority, we must go back thirty-two months, almost three years before April 6, 1917, to one of the most important but largely forgotten episodes of World War I. In the misty dawn of August 5, 1914, the 1,013-ton British ship
Telconia
, an aptly named layer of undersea cables, hove to in the North Sea off the German port of Emden. On August 4, after a month of halfhearted attempts to defuse the crisis created by the brutal assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, heirs to the Austro-Hungarian empire’s throne, by a Serbian terrorist, the war had begun. An Austrian army assaulted Serbia. Russia, determined to defend its Slav cousins, attacked Germany and Austria from the east. The French, allied with Russia, attacked from the west. The German army marched into Belgium and Luxembourg as part of its plan to outflank French forts and armies along the Franco-German border, capture Paris, and end the war on the Western Front in a month.

That same day, Great Britain had demanded Germany’s immediate withdrawal from Belgium, citing a decades-old treaty Europe’s major powers had signed guaranteeing that country’s neutrality. Only a handful of people knew the real reason for England’s intervention. Years earlier, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had negotiated a secret understanding with the French to join them in resisting a German attack. He had negotiated an equally secret alliance with the Russians. Most of the British cabinet did not know about these agreements, which included extensive consultations between the French and British military staffs. They were also concealed from the British Parliament. While his fellow liberals talked peace and forbearance with Germany, Grey had become a confirmed German hater, who saw Berlin’s rising power as a mortal threat to the British empire.

London’s ultimatum had expired at midnight on August 4, while the
Telconia
was en route to its rendezvous point off Emden. Fathoms beneath the ship’s keel lay a network of five cables that wended south from Germany through the English Channel, one to France, one to Spain, one to North Africa and two to New York City. On board the
Telconia
were huge grappling hooks that enabled the ship to retrieve malfunctioning cables from the sea bottom for repairs. Down slid the grapples into the cold, gray depths, and soon, one by one, the five mud-covered sheaths of coppercovered wires were hauled aboard. Each was hacked apart and dropped back into the sea. Henceforth, Germany could communicate securely with the Western Hemisphere only through a subsidiary cable that ran from Liberia to Brazil, a line that was largely U.S. owned.

Six months later, after some friendly persuasion from London, which undoubtedly included plenty of pounds sterling, this link too was eliminated by one of
Telconia’
s sister ships. That meant Berlin had to depend on Guglielmo Marconi’s newly invented and somewhat undependable wireless—and all these messages could be intercepted and deciphered by British cryptanalysts.
²

The
New York Times
reported the cutting of the main cables on August 6, 1914. The reporter dutifully noted that from now on,“all word of happenings in Germany must pass through hostile countries—Russia on the east, France on the west, and England on the north.” (These three allies would soon be known to newspaper readers as the Triple Entente.) The consul general of Germany’s chief ally, Austria-Hungary, in one of the greatest understatements of the twentieth century, told the
Times:
“The cutting of that cable may do us great injury. If only one side of the case is given . . . prejudice will be created against us here.”
³

A week after Great Britain entered the war and began frantic efforts to ship an expeditionary force to Belgium, Parliament passed a Defence of the Realm Act, soon to be known as DORA, which gave British censors the power to scrutinize every word that went from England to the United States and elsewhere in the world. American reporters in England and at the battlefronts in France soon learned this meant only stories that favored the Triple Entente would leave the British Isles. Some reporters tried to cover the war from Berlin, but they had to send their stories through the neutral Netherlands to London for cabling to the United States. The British censors also read their copy. On August 2, 1916, a group of American correspondents in Berlin signed a protest complaining that their dispatches were constantly “suppressed, mutilated or delayed” by the London censor. Americans were not getting the “vital half ” of the most important events of the war.
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Within a month of declaring war, the British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, put his friend and member of Parliament, Charles F. G. Masterman, in charge of propaganda. A journalist and author of some note before he turned to politics, Masterman took over several floors in Wellington House, a London office building not far from Buckingham Palace. Masterman warned his staff that they would toil in secret and be thanked or honored by no one for their efforts. He swiftly convened meetings with top British authors, such as H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and John Galsworthy, to enlist them in the large effort he contemplated. They consented without a demur. On September 19, 1914, fifty-three writers subscribed to a statement in the
Times
of London, calling on Englishmen to “defend the rights of small nations” against “the rule of Blood and Iron.” Wells, who liked to describe himself as an extreme pacifist, was soon to declare:“I hate Germany, which has thrust this experience upon mankind, as I hate some horrible infectious disease.”
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Masterman early saw the importance of a separate propaganda department for the United States. Its immense wealth and resources were essential for the survival of His Majesty’s empire. For this task, Masterman chose a fellow member of Parliament, Sir Gilbert Parker, a Canadian-born bestselling author of novels about the Canadian Northwest (a region he had never visited). The books featured absurdly unrealistic characters and numerous scenes of blood and gore.

Although Parker’s novels were trash and a British newsman described him as “an ass and self-promoter,” he was a clever, enormously energetic man. Thanks to his books and frequent visits, he had many friends in the United States. He assembled an excellent staff of assistants, which included historian A.J. Toynbee of Oxford. They combed
Who’s Who in America
and other sources to assemble a mailing list of 260,000 influential men and women. Sir Gilbert also arranged for a weekly report from the British embassy in Washington, the
American Press Résumé
, to keep him in close touch with the public mood as it manifested itself in America’s 20,000 newspapers. He supplied 360 papers in less populated states with a weekly “newspaper” that purveyed London’s line on the war. He arranged for American reporters to interview more than one hundred prominent Englishmen, from the prime minister to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The numerous VIP speakers Parker dispatched to the United States to win hearts and minds also provided him with voluminous reports on what stories and themes worked best. By 1917, Parker had 54 people working for him.

In March 1918, when the Americans were safely in the war, Parker published an article in
Harper’s Monthly
in which he bragged about his role in persuading the United States to intervene. He claimed that he always cautioned British speakers to avoid exhorting Americans to join the hostilities. These missionaries had embarked on a task of “extreme difficulty and delicacy,” and the results could only be obtained by letting the Americans make up their own minds that “German policy is a betrayal of civilization.” The latter remark is a graphic glimpse of Parker’s objectivity.
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Also very much in the propaganda field were voluntary British organizations, such as the Union of Democratic Control (a revealing juxtaposition of terms) and the Central Committee for National Patriotic Organizations (CNPO). The Central Committee was almost as formidable as Wellington House. Created on November 21, 1914, soon after the British Expeditionary Force had been bloodied in its first encounter with the German army in Belgium, the CNPO had affiliates in all the neutral countries and a separate committee that concentrated on the United States. This group too sent pamphlets, books and speakers to America.
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In the former colonies (aka, the United States) voluntary organizations sprang up that also became valuable channels for British propaganda. One of the most important was the Navy League. Its members included dozens of major bankers and corporate executives, from J. P. Morgan, Jr., to Cornelius Vanderbilt.“What a band of patriots,” Senator Robert La Follette exclaimed when he saw their membership list.“Owning newspapers, periodicals and magazines and controlling through business relations the editorial good will of many others.”

Virtually confirming the senator’s comment, in the fall of 1914 one of Morgan’s partners remarked: “In America [at present] there are 50,000 people who understand the necessity of the United States entering the war on [England’s] side. But there are 100,000,000 Americans who have not even thought of it. Our task is to see that those figures are reversed.”
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Equally potent was the National Security League, which was created to preach preparedness but soon spent much of its time and energy echoing British propaganda handouts and warning of the danger of German “reservists” operating under cover in the United States. These homegrown Anglophiles were almost all situated in the Northeast, with the heaviest concentration in New York City, whose newspapers dominated editorial opinion in the rest of the country.
⁹

Also not to be discounted were the numerous immigrants from the British Isles and Canada, many of them fairly well-to-do, who eagerly volunteered to help the mother country in its hour of peril. Woodrow Wilson’s four grandparents and his mother were among these nineteenth-century arrivals. Unlike American immigrants with foreign-sounding names and scant knowledge of English, these British (in Wilson’s case, Scottish and Scotch-Irish) newcomers had won ready acceptance in American middle-and upper-class society. They had access to men and women of power and influence.
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The Wellington House propaganda machine had a ready-made supply of themes on which to elaborate. Since 1896, the Conservative Party, with the avid cooperation of press tycoon Alfred Harmsworth, a low-rent version of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, had been ranting about Germany’s “militarism” and its intention to attack England. The Tories sneered at Germany’s boasts about its
Kultur
and the prosperity of its working class, who enjoyed pensions and health care while most of England’s workers had neither and lived in some of the worst slums in Europe. The Germans, according to Harmsworth, were thick-necked helots who obeyed the orders of the generals and Prussian aristocrats who ran the country. Harmsworth also portrayed Wilhelm II, Germany’s kaiser, as a bully and a menace.

Elevated to the peerage as Lord Northcliffe, Harmsworth owned a megachain of newspapers and magazines, including the venerable
Times
of London, which struggled to retain some vestiges of respectability in his sordid grip. The seat of Northcliffe’s power was his flagship, the
Daily Mail
. With a circulation of more than a million, it was a veritable epitome of yellow journalism.
¹¹

In 1906, Northcliffe sponsored and serialized a novel by William Le Queux, dramatizing a brutal German conquest of Britain with the help of a secret civilian army of reservists disguised as waiters, clerks, hairdressers and bakers. The book, unimaginatively titled
The Invasion of 1910,
sold over a million copies worldwide and was popular in the United States. To advertise the serial, Northcliffe had sandwich men dressed as German soldiers, complete with spiked helmets, parading London’s streets.
¹²

Wrapping this hate propaganda around the cry of preparedness, Northcliffe almost single-handedly revived the British Conservative Party in the elections of 1912. He was backed by the National Service League, which called for a conscription law, and Britain’s Navy League, which constantly warned that Germany’s decision to build a big navy meant that it was out to dominate the world. Anglophiles in the United States soon transferred this paranoia to the Western Hemisphere, finding evidence of pan-Germanism in German immigrants to Brazil and other South American countries. In fact, Germany’s imperialism was timid and indecisive most of the time. German immigrants in southern Brazil, for instance, pleaded in vain for money from Berlin to build a railroad to connect them to the sea. When Germany sent warships to demand payment from Venezuela for long-overdue debts, it scrupulously asked American permission, lest it violate the Monroe Doctrine. The Germans were fearful of offending major powers, especially England and the United States, and worsening their sense of isolation.
¹³

The real reason for Northcliffe’s hate campaign was economic, not military. For more than a decade, Germany had been challenging England as a competitor in the world marketplace. British economic power was in decline everywhere. Between January and June 1914, Germany’s exports and gross national product had exceeded England’s for the first time. Senator La Follette cited this competition as the real reason for the slaughter in Europe. George Bernard Shaw said the same thing in an obstreperous pamphlet that outraged the writers who had obediently parroted Wellington House’s line. Ultimately, Woodrow Wilson himself would admit this dolorous truth.
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